Blue Origin is getting ready to fly a New Shepard suborbital rocket sometime between Dec. 11–14. On Dec. 9, 2017, the company issued a notice to airmen, also called a NOTAM, for the area around its rocket site near Van Horn, Texas.

In the last year, Blue Origin pushed its New Shepard suborbital vehicle in more complex tests, unveiled a reusable orbital rocket, and broke ground on a new factory in Florida. Now the company is looking one step further, revealing a design for a lunar lander at the 33rd Space Symposium.

In a March 29, 2017, email, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos revealed additional progress on the company’s New Shepard suborbital space tourism capsule. Instead of focusing on spaceflight technologies, the latest images coming out of the company show tantalizing photos of the ship’s interior.

Poor weather conditions may have delayed the test for 24 hours, but that didn't stop Blue Origin from putting on a heck of a show while testing the New Shepard's launch abort system. At 11:36 a.m. EDT (15:36 GMT) on Oct. 5, after a nearly 40-minute hold, the rocket and capsule zipped off the pad for a final flight.

In a recent e-mail, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos unveiled more details about the company’s family of future orbital launch vehicles, named New Glenn. The new vehicles include two-stage and three-stage versions with a first stage producing 3.85 million pounds (17.1 million newtons) of thrust. The orbital vehicles are named for the first American astronaut to reach orbit – John Glenn.

As the New Shepard vehicle accelerates through max Q, a flight computer detects an anomaly and triggers an in-flight abort. The crew module shoots away from the stricken booster to safely return its occupants to Earth. Though notional in description, this is what Blue Origin plans to verify in an early October 2016 test flight of its reusable launch system.

Landing with a failed parachute is not a condition a company would normally want their spacecraft to encounter, but that was exactly the scenario Blue Origin planned for the fourth test flight of their New Shepard vehicle last month. After a month of analysis, Blue Origin's founder, Jeff Bezos, gave the word in an e-mail update that the test was a success.

Rising into the West Texas skies for the fourth time in seven months was Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard rocket and capsule. The goal of this uncrewed flight was to test a “failure mode” of the systems crew capsule’s parachute.

It’s one thing to test a rocket to make sure that everything is working properly, but engineers will tell you that the other thing you also have to test is how systems work when things go wrong. Blue Origin plans on doing exactly that on Friday. (This test has now been moved to Sunday)

Blue Origin has become the sixth company to be awarded a contract under NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, joining several other NewSpace companies in a set of opportunities designed to provide space for suborbital payloads.

Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft conducted its third flight on April 2, 2016. The integrated stack reached an apogee of 339,178 feet (103 kilometers). Perhaps most notably, it marked the third time that particular booster was used to carry out a test flight – proving the reusability of the design.

Third time was the charm, that has to be what Jeff Bezos must be thinking today. His company's New Shepard rocket carried out its third successful launch and landing on Saturday, April 2. With this latest flight, the company is one step closer toward having tourists roar to sub-orbit within the foreseeable time frame.

It has been just less than of two months since a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket lifted off, separated from the capsule that it carried, and carried out a controlled landing. Today, Friday, Jan. 22, 2016, that same booster has launched – and landed – again.

Blue Origin successfully flew their New Shepard suborbital spacecraft and booster to space in an unpiloted test reaching a planned altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before landing back at the launch site.